1.19.03 – playing grown-up

tomorrow i start my day job – the first (probably of many) day job i’ve had since i started doing this theatre thing a couple of years ago. while i’m pleased to go to work for a company that hired me based on a cover letter that referred to myself as Princess Jennifer, it doesn’t change the fact that the SM offers have dried up so completely that i need a day job. i realize that i’ve been on a luckier-than-most streak, making one show or season lead right into the next, into the next, but deep down i still feel pretty lame for having to resort to being a receptionist for the next couple of months. the real issue here, actually, is my own ego. while i know that day jobs are a normal part of every theatre artist’s financial existence, the type-a in me thinks that i’m supposed to be good at everything. and if i’m good at everything, that includes being good at getting by on theatre work alone. even in a town that has only two professional theatres. andy’s been through several rounds of my 3 am temper tantrums over this, and he’s right about everything – that i’m being egotistical to think that everyone will want to hire me all the time, that i set unreasonably high standards for myself, that i take everything too personally in a business in which hiring decisions are rarely merit-based. he’s also marvelously patient with me, and good at lending me a less neurotic perspective on the world. i’d be lost without him.

it’s good that the BW hired me; trips to the employment agencies last week were especially demoralizing. the agents were condescending, the skills tests insulting, and the job prospects poor. i came home from the first appointment depressed. i went to stanford, for god’s sake! where did i go wrong? i wailed at the unsuspecting andy. he looked at me and said, you don’t like being poor, do you? it was a fair question, given the amount of time i’ve spent worrying about money lately. i guess it depends on the definition of poor. i don’t care if we never have IKEA furniture or matching glassware, i told him. when i have money enough to pay dentist bills and buy modest christmas presents, for groceries, cheap meals out, cat food, a new book now and then, then it’s easy to believe that less is more, and i honestly don’t mind cooking creatively for lack of pots and pans or furnishing my house with thrift store furniture. it gets harder not to measure my success on a monetary scale when the basics get dicey.

this career requires enormous amounts of faith. faith that something else, the next job, will come along, faith that god or fate or providence will open the next door if you can just hang in there and have patience. and with faith comes dark moments of doubt, when i think that i’ll never work again, that i’ve wasted my stanford education on something that was intellectually stimulating but but financially useless. mostly, the darkness comes from the fact that i still can’t imagine doing anything else with my life. its why andy and i are moving to chicago in the fall. theatre is like breathing for us. it’s not a way to making a living, it’s how we live.